House of the Dragon (TV Program)

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      What to Know About ‘House of the Dragon,’ ‘Game of Thrones’ Prequel

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      HBO’s new “Game of Thrones” prequel takes us back to the land of Westeros, hundreds of years earlier. We’ve got your cheat sheet.In the final episodes of HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” the mad queen Daenerys Targaryen incinerated most of the capital city of King’s Landing. But what was it like when it was all still standing, and the Targaryen dynasty ruled with an iron fist — er, throne?That’s the question explored by “House of the Dragon,” the new series set in author George R.R. Martin’s revisionist epic-fantasy world. Created by Martin along with Ryan Condal, who serves as showrunner with the veteran “Thrones” director Miguel Sapochnik, “Dragon” takes place far back into the ancestral line of the “Thrones” protagonists Daenerys and Jon Snow, whose own Targaryen identity was revealed late in the original show’s run.As their forebears battle for control of Westeros’s Iron Throne, what do you need to know about the new series, and its connection to what has gone before — or, more accurately, after? Our cheat sheet has you covered. Read on and prepare to dance with dragons.A pregame of thronesThough it is the successor series to “Game of Thrones,” “House of the Dragon” is actually a prequel. Set 172 years before the birth of Daenerys Targaryen, it chronicles the history of her royal family during a tumultuous time, a calamitous internecine war known as “The Dance of the Dragons.” During this conflict, a slew of Targaryens and their dragon steeds — these fire-breathing beasts were more plentiful at this point in Westerosi history — did battle for the Iron Throne.That said, “Dragon” shares several key elements with its predecessor series. These include Martin, who wrote the books that form the basis of both shows — the “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels for the original series and the prequel book “Fire & Blood” for the new one.Return to Westeros in ‘House of the Dragon’HBO’s long-awaited “Game of Thrones” spinoff will debut on Aug. 21.A Primer: Though it is the successor to the groundbreaking fantasy drama, “House of the Dragon” is actually a prequel. Here’s what else you need to know.The Stakes: Can the new series save the future of the “Game of Thrones” franchise? George R.R. Martin and HBO are about to find out.Wearing the Crown: A string of critically acclaimed roles has lifted Paddy Considine, who stars as King Viserys Targaryen in the show, from hardscrabble roots to a seat on the Iron Throne.‘Thrones’ Guide: Want to take a deep dive into past episodes and plot twists? Check out our obsessive compendium to the original series.Condal is new to the franchise, as is the entire cast. But Sapochnik, the other showrunner, directed several of the most memorable “Thrones” episodes, including “Hardhome,” “Battle of the Bastards” and “The Bells.” The composer Ramin Djawadi returns, as do unmistakable elements of his “Thrones” theme music.In addition, the setting of King’s Landing and its royal seat, the Red Keep, are virtually identical to the versions we’ve seen previously, as are the various noble houses’ symbols or “sigils” and even their hairstyles. The Iron Throne itself may have been enhanced by hundreds more melted-down blades, but this is very much the same Westeros we’ve already occupied for eight seasons.“House of the Dragon” begins with the naming of Viserys as heir to the Targaryen throne.Ollie Upton/HBOA family affair“Game of Thrones” famously depicted strife between several noble houses, most notably the Starks and the Lannisters, who rose to power after the death of the last Targaryen monarch, the Mad King Aegon IV. But most of these houses — Stark, Lannister, Greyjoy, Tyrell, Martell — recede into the background in “House of the Dragon.” The new show is focused almost exclusively on the Targaryen family, the dynasty that conquered Westeros over a century before the events that kick off “Dragon.”When the series begins, a great council of the aristocracy is convened to select Old King Jaehaerys Targaryen’s son Viserys (Paddy Considine) over his older female cousin, Rhaenys (Eve Best), as heir to the throne, on explicitly patriarchal grounds. The council, a comparatively democratic body during these feudal times, is intended to put such questions of succession to rest.In Westeros, as in our world, momentous decisions often reverberate in unexpected directions and lead to unanticipated conflict. The main players in “House of the Dragon” include the well-meaning but ineffectual King Viserys and his younger brother, the roguish Prince Daemon (Matt Smith), who would inherit the throne if his brother dies. Viserys’s closest adviser is Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), the Hand of the King — a position of great influence, as it was in “Thrones.” Hightower is a rival of the kingdoms’ richest man, the veteran seafarer Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint), who is married to Rhaenys and who, like the Targaryens, is a descendant of the ancient empire of Valyria.In an echo of the earlier succession dispute, another natural claimant to the throne is Viserys’s daughter, Princess Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock as a youth, Emma D’Arcy as an adult), his only surviving child. Also central to things is Rhaenyra’s childhood friend Alicent Hightower (played by Emily Carey and Olivia Cooke), the daughter of the ambitious and calculating Otto.Trouble, obviously, ensues.The story’s main players include Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) and Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best).HBOUnreliable narrators“Game of Thrones” was based on Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels: “A Game of Thrones,” “A Clash of Kings,” “A Storm of Swords,” “A Feast for Crows” and “A Dance With Dragons.” (Still to come: “The Winds of Winter,” which Martin has been working on for years, and “A Dream of Spring.”) But “Fire & Blood,” the “Dragon” source material, is written as a faux-historical tome rather than as a proper novel. Martin wrote the book in the voice of one Archmaester Gyldayn, a historian from within the world of Westeros itself. As such, many of its main characters’ motives, actions and dialogue remain matters of conjecture.Complicating matters further, Gyldayn’s primary and secondary sources have their own conflicting writing styles, political loyalties and points of view. (Among the fandom, the most popular of these is “The Testimony of Mushroom,” a salacious account of events written by the Targaryen court jester, who does not seem to appear in “Dragon” at all, at least not yet.) These shifting viewpoints leave several crucial matters, from trysts to betrayals, in a did-they-or-didn’t-they limbo.Given that several of these question marks drive the battles for supremacy that will likely drive “Dragon” in turn, the show will have to come down on one side or the other. For longtime fans and newcomers alike, these are likely to be the juiciest and most thrilling sections of the story, which will unfold over multiple seasons, if the gods be good.Light your candles to the Seven, and we’ll learn together who comes out on top. More

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      Can ‘House of the Dragon’ Be HBO’s Next ‘Game of Thrones’?

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      The stakes are high for the first “Thrones” spinoff, which could determine nothing less than the future of the franchise.LOS ANGELES — George R.R. Martin has seen the comments, and he’s read the emails.Ever since “Game of Thrones,” the groundbreaking HBO fantasy series, went off the air in May 2019, he has been well aware of the backlash against the show’s final season. Martin, the man who painstakingly created the “Thrones” universe over the last three decades through his many books, and who was mostly on the sidelines during the final seasons of the TV series, does wonder if there will be some viewers who skip “House of the Dragon,” the first “Thrones” spinoff. The series will make its much-anticipated debut on HBO and HBO Max on Aug. 21.“People say, ‘I’m done with “Game of Thrones,” they burned me, I’m not even going to watch this new show — I’m not going to watch any of the new shows,’” Martin said in a recent interview.The question, he said, is how much of the “Thrones” audience do the complainers represent?“I mean, are we talking about a million people?” he asked. “Or are we talking about 1,000? People who have nothing to do except tweet all day over and over again? I don’t know.”Martin and HBO are about to find out.Three years after the most popular show in HBO’s history bowed out, the hunt for a successor is finally over. It took a lot of effort to get here. Numerous “Thrones” prequels were put into development, and a pilot episode for another spinoff was filmed before it was canceled. Tens of millions of dollars have been poured into the winner of the bake-off, “House of the Dragon.”The stakes are high. Success for “House of the Dragon” would reassure HBO executives that viewers are craving more “Thrones” stories and could lead to many more shows set in Westeros and beyond. In addition to this series, HBO has at least five other “Thrones” projects in active development.“The trick here is, you don’t want to just remake the original show,” said Casey Bloys, the HBO chief content officer. “You want to make a show that feels related and honors the original, but also feels like its own.“It is a very important franchise to us.”Paddy Considine plays King Viserys Targaryen, the occupant of the Iron Throne.Ollie Upton/HBOBut if the first one out of the gate fails to find an audience, it could raise questions about whether the Thrones Cinematic Universe is really the intellectual property gold mine that HBO executives hope it is.HBO’s new corporate overlords, executives from Discovery, have a crushing $53 billion debt load, and they have been looking for savings — in other words, high-cost “Thrones” spinoffs had better pay off. “House of the Dragon” will also have plenty of competition in the would-be blockbuster space. Two weeks into the prequel’s run, Amazon will debut its enormously expensive and ambitious “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.” Will two splashy, big-budget fantasy series be too much for some viewers?It will also have to overcome the stench of a final few episodes that left fans and critics scratching their heads at hairpin narrative turns as the series galloped well past the still-unfinished works of Martin’s series of books, “A Song of Ice and Fire.”Return to Westeros in ‘House of the Dragon’HBO’s long-awaited “Game of Thrones” spinoff will debut on Aug. 21.A Primer: Though it is the successor to the groundbreaking fantasy drama, “House of the Dragon” is actually a prequel. Here’s what else you need to know.The Stakes: Can the new series save the future of the “Game of Thrones” franchise? George R.R. Martin and HBO are about to find out.Wearing the Crown: A string of critically acclaimed roles has lifted Paddy Considine, who stars as King Viserys Targaryen in the show, from hardscrabble roots to a seat on the Iron Throne.‘Thrones’ Guide: Want to take a deep dive into past episodes and plot twists? Check out our obsessive compendium to the original series.But those are the challenges.Here’s what “House of Dragon” has going for it: “Thrones,” which ran between 2011 and 2019, was the most-watched show in HBO’s history. That controversial finale drew nearly 20 million viewers the night it premiered — an astonishing figure in the fragmented streaming era. “Thrones” was also a delight to critics and won more Emmys than any series in TV history, including winning best drama four times.The series changed television in so many ways — lavish budgets, technical wizardry, a cinematic scope that was once rare for the small screen — that it can be a little too easy to overlook the incredibly strong foundation it built for spinoffs.“I do believe that is a little bit more of an online narrative than it is in real life,” Bloys said, of the final season backlash. “I mean, we have the data of who’s watching ‘Game of Thrones,’ and it is consistently in the Top 10 assets that people watch on HBO Max around the world. As we’re coming closer to the premiere of this show, we’ve seen people going back, and we’ve seen an uptick in the viewership on HBO Max for the flagship series.”The final season of “Game of Thrones” inspired a backlash online.HBO“House of the Dragon” takes place almost 200 years before the events of “Game of Thrones.” The series follows the Targaryen family — that would be the silver-haired, dragon-flying crew, the one that Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) made famous in the original series — just as it is about to rupture, with dire consequences for the realm.And in the premiere episode, there are elements that will look familiar to “Thrones” viewers, including plenty of gore, multiple dragons and an Iron Throne. Also: nudity and an orgy.It took more than five years to get to this point. In May 2017, with the penultimate season of “Game of Thrones” about to debut, the network announced that it had four potential spinoffs in the works. A year later, a candidate was chosen: a prequel that would take place some 1,000 years before the events of the original series.It would not last. By 2019, after the pilot was shot, the network pulled the plug.“Once I saw that first pilot, I knew that was not the series to launch,” Bob Greenblatt, the former chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment, where he oversaw HBO, wrote in an email. Greenblatt said the pilot didn’t feel “expansive or epic enough.”At that time, the clock was also ticking. HBO had been very deliberate in developing spinoffs, and WarnerMedia, then owned by AT&T, was months away from debuting its new streaming service, HBO Max. Greenblatt was “desperate to get something — anything — from the ‘Game of Thrones’ I.P. into our pipelines,” he wrote.“I understood Casey and the team’s reluctance to throw a new ‘Game of Thrones’ show into production (especially since the backlash from the final season of the original series),” he added. “However, while we all knew no sequel or prequel would probably ever rise to the level of the original, there was agreement we had to go forward with something.”Luckily, the network had another project in development, one that Martin had been pushing for some time: his rise-and-fall tale of the Targaryens, which he had written about extensively in his books. “House of the Dragon” is adapted from Martin’s “Fire & Blood,” the first in a planned two-volume chronicle of the family’s exploits and clashes.Miguel Sapochnik (right, with Matt Smith, left, and Fabien Frankel), a director of “Game of Thrones,” is a showrunner of the new series.Ollie Upton/HBO“He was very passionate about this particular story,” said Miguel Sapochnik, a veteran of the original series and a showrunner of “House of the Dragon.”The network cycled through two writers before Martin asked for help from an old friend: The writer Ryan Condal, a creator of the USA science fiction show, “Colony.”Condal caught up regularly with Martin over dinner and drinks and geeked out over the works of other fantasists like Robert E. Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Ursula K. Le Guin. “When we would get together we would, you know, talk like two fanboys do,” Martin said. Martin asked Condal to start writing a Targaryen prequel.HBO executives liked what they saw in Condal, who signed on as a creator, with Martin, and as a showrunner. After Sapochnik, who directed some of the original’s biggest episodes, also agreed to be a showrunner, HBO ordered “House of the Dragon” straight to series.“What appealed to me about it was it’s a family drama,” Bloys said. “Anybody who has stepparents or siblings or half siblings, or had warring factions of a family — I think every single family in America has dealt with some version of this.”As Condal got to work on “House of the Dragon,” he leaned on Martin’s expertise a lot — the opposite of what had happened with Martin in the later seasons of “Game of Thrones.” In the early seasons, Martin wrote and read scripts, consulted on casting decisions and visited sets. Over time, however, as he stepped back to focus on his long-delayed next “Thrones” novel, “The Winds of Winter,” Martin grew estranged from the show, which was created by D.B. Weiss and David Benioff.“By Season 5 and 6, and certainly 7 and 8, I was pretty much out of the loop,” Martin said.When asked why, he said, “I don’t know — you have to ask Dan and David.” (A representative for Weiss and Benioff declined to comment.)Martin also said that “The Winds of Winter” — which he conceded is “very, very late” but vowed to finish — diverges from where “Game of Thrones,” the series, went.“My ending will be very different,” he said.Martin said he wants from “Thrones” what Marvel has done — created a world that Disney continues to mine and that fans reliably show up to watch. Last year, he signed an overall deal with HBO, and he has been actively involved with the other spinoffs in development.“George, for us, in this process has been a really valuable resource,” Bloys said. “He is literally the creator of this world. He is its historian, its creator, its keeper. And so I can’t imagine doing a show that he didn’t believe in or didn’t endorse.”As for viewership totals, Bloys said he did not expect “House of the Dragon” to match the heights of “Game of Thrones.” But he was still hopeful that it will be a hit and lay the groundwork for future spinoffs.“There’s no world in which we expect this to pick up where the original left off,” Bloys said. “I think the show will do really well. But it will have to do the work on its own to bring people in and to sustain the viewership.” More

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      After ‘Game of Thrones,’ Can TV Get Big Again?

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      After “Game of Thrones,” many said the blockbuster series was dead. Maybe not — but the future of TV epics may look more like the movies’ recent past.In spring 2019, as “Game of Thrones” aired its final season, the talk among TV-industry pundits was that the age of dragons was not the only era coming to an end. “Thrones,” the thinking went, might just be the last big TV series ever: That is, the last blockbuster-level behemoth that would dazzle and focus the obsession of a mass audience.I don’t know if anyone’s told you this, but a lot has changed since spring 2019.The pandemic, obviously, bolstered TV’s status as a virtual arena. “Tiger King” was a TV event, and so was “Hamilton” and “Godzilla Vs. Kong.” If theaters’ strength is to bring audiences together, TV’s is to bring audiences together, apart. And as with the shift to working from home, it’s not clear how much of this ground TV will cede back, now that we know how much it’s possible to do without leaving your couch. “Dune,” when it’s released this fall, will be partly a TV event too, via HBO Max, even though theaters have reopened.But if we focus just on the TV part of TV — that is, series made for home-and-device distribution rather than for theaters — the post-“Thrones” question remains: Can any one program, in an age of bingeing, streaming and thousands of choices, bring together a mass audience?This fall and later, several high-profile genre spectacles — from sci-fi to fantasy to dystopian fiction — are betting on yes. On Sept. 24, Apple TV+ premieres “Foundation,” based on the Isaac Asimov novels about the attempt to use “psychohistory” to shape the future of a galactic empire. Earlier this month, FX unveiled the ambitious and long-gestating “Y: The Last Man,” about an apocalypse that kills every human with a Y chromosome save for one.Later in the fall: Amazon’s “The Wheel of Time,” another long-in-the-making epic, based on the sprawling fantasy series by Robert Jordan. Next year: also from Amazon, a series based on one of the few remaining megamythologies not to get a major series adaptation, “The Lord of the Rings”; plus HBO’s “Thrones” prequel, “House of the Dragon,” about Westeros’s messiest platinum blondes, the Targaryen family.From left, Emmy D’Arcy and Matt Smith in HBO’s “Thrones” prequel, “House of the Dragon.” HBO MaxIf the age of blockbuster TV is over, the coming season has not been informed.And there is evidence that event TV is not dead, even if “events” no longer involve us all gathering around our TV sets at 9 p.m. on Sundays. Since the end of “Thrones,” we’ve seen the rise of the next generation of streaming platforms, which provided a direct pipeline from the biggest megatainment companies to the screens in your living room and in your pocket.Disney in particular has driven this change. Its engulfing of the Star Wars and Marvel franchises put two of the movies’ biggest universes into one company, and Disney+ promptly started turning them into TV. It was not long ago that the appearance of a Star Wars or superhero entertainment was a rare treat; now it’s a Wednesday. (Still to come this year: a series built around Star Wars’ Boba Fett and one about the Avengers’ Hawkeye.)The platform showed that, even in the difficult-to-quantify world of streaming, the right TV series can get a mass audience chattering. But Disney+ shows got big by aiming small. That is, they worked best when they fit their big-screen universes into packages that worked for serial TV — intimate, conversational or (relatively) quiet — rather than two hours of movie-house pyrotechnics.Amazon’s “The Wheel of Time” is based on the sprawling fantasy series by Robert Jordan. Amazon StudiosSo “WandaVision” moved a peripheral “Avengers” story line onto a series of classic-TV sets, recreating period sitcoms from half a century to tell a story of grief. (It was less effective, in fact, when it built to an action climax — that is, when it tried to be a Marvel movie.) “The Mandalorian” built on the old-time Western element already present in Star Wars to make a gunslinger-and-sidekick bromance. “Loki” portioned out the superpowered ham of Tom Hiddleston’s film performance in a playful sci-fi story that prioritized talk over effects.Of course, Disney had the advantage of making big TV from already-big intellectual property that it owned. It’s pointless by now to distinguish whether Marvel and Star Wars are movie universes that extend to TV or vice versa; the shows and films are just tributaries in a giant network of content, each promoting the other.The drawback of TV’s new blockbusters, then, may be that they’re doomed to become more like the movies’ blockbusters: dragon-like in scale, mouse-like in creative ambition, at least when it comes to anything that doesn’t involve an established brand. Efforts by other outlets to world-build original genre franchises, like HBO’s labyrinthine steampunk serial “The Nevers,” have been less successful.On the one hand, the fact that the next “The Lord of the Rings” expansion is coming to your living room rather than your local multiplex is a sign of a more TV-centric entertainment future. On the other hand, that future, at least for high-profile TV, may be more and more like the movies’ recent past: big-budget but cautious renderings of stories with built-in followings, endless revisits of corporate properties that you already like.If we’re stuck with old stories expensively retold, the hope is that they at least have something to say to a new moment. From what we know of the new season’s genre epics (most of which, at press time, critics have yet to see), it’s nothing cheerful.Alfred Enoch in “Foundation” on Apple TV+, which is based on the Isaac Asimov novels.Helen Sloan/Apple TV+If there’s a common thread to many of them, it’s world-changing catastrophe. Granted, that’s often a given in high fantasy and sci-fi, but the disasters at the core of these series — the revenge of nature, self-destruction through hubris — could speak loudly now (if you can hear them over the extreme weather alerts).Even the series that aren’t prequels are often preludes to a fall. “The Lord of the Rings” movies, for instance, arrived through an accident of timing as a kind of rallying call after the 9/11 attacks. The new series takes place thousands of years before the events of the films, in Middle-earth’s Second Age — which, if you know your Tolkien, ended with the fabled kingdom of Númenor being swallowed by the sea in a cataclysm it brought on itself.Likewise, “Foundation,” telling the story of a pending man-made disaster that cannot be stopped, only mitigated, could have a lot to say to a society that has been through and is looking ahead to [gestures at everything]. We have a doomed royal house in “Dragon”; in “Y,” a pandemic story that combines apocalyptic political intrigue with a more sex- and gender-conscious version of “The Walking Dead.”And “The Wheel of Time,” already renewed for a second season before its first has appeared, is built on a mythology that involves a repeating cycle of renewal and destruction. That theme may mirror not just an anxious world, but the rise and fall of media trends that produced this series and its peers.The epic TV event, that most elusive and awe-inspiring of fabulous beasts, may well have been pronounced dead. But that doesn’t mean it can’t rise again — even if it’s in a too-familiar form. More